OUR VIEW: A chastened Obama focuses on the economy, but there's doubt a divided Washington can help there or anywhere else

After a year in office for the candidate of hope and change, many Americans are hoping for change.

And President Barack Obama -- buffeted by double-digit unemployment, approval ratings that have plummeted over concerns about his expansive, expensive plans, and last week's election of a red U.S. senator in a state as blue as indigo -- sounds as if he's getting the message.

AP photoObama speaks to Congress and the nation in his first State of the Union addressWednesday evening, the unmistakable subtext in Obama's State of the Union address was that he wishes he'd done some things a little differently over the past year. Even in the leadup to the speech, senior Obama officials took to the airwaves to express some regrets and pledge a new course.

For Obama, such change is necessary. Wednesday's address, as many pundits have said, let him hit the reset button. But in a Capitol gridlocked by hyperpartisanship, what hope is there for change that will lead to any different results? That, as much as any policy Obama proposes or fights, should be the cause for concern for Americans.

As far as Obama's proposals Wednesday night, it was hard to argue with much of the focus of his speech: The president made clear that Job No. 1 for 2010 is jobs -- specifically, job creation. Frankly, with an unemployment rate at 10 percent nationally (and 11 percent in Alabama), it should have been a top priority much sooner.

Obama touted jobs saved through the stimulus act, and Alabama has seen its share through stimulus-supported state budgets that softened the recession's blow on state workers and education employees. Much more important, though, is what the president plans to do that will create new jobs to replace the 7 million jobs lost in the past two years because of the economy.

Toward that end, Obama offered plans including tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers or raise wages, ending the capital gains taxes on small business investment, and a tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, that invest in new plants and equipment. Those ideas are sound.

Obama was less convincing talking about government belt-tightening. He defended adding $1 trillion to the deficit to avoid an economic depression, and proposed freezing discretionary spending for three years. That's the spending which doesn't include national security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which limits the amount of cutting possible. Obama said his administration has identified $20 billion in savings for next year. It's a start.

Obama talked of another deficit that had to resonate with Americans, regardless of their political leanings: the "deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."

Those doubts have been growing because every day in Washington is election day, as Obama said. The end game for both political parties is to make the other side look bad instead of working to improve the lives of the American people. Despite Obama's pleas for unity and saying he will listen to Republican ideas, even on health care, the truth is, he has relied almost exclusively on overwhelming numbers of Democrats in the House and Senate to advance his agenda. His defenders say he has been forced to by a Republican Party that has opposed him every step of the way.

Regardless who deserves the blame (both sides), Republicans will be in no mood to cooperate. That's because with two new Republican governors, a new Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts and Obama's declining poll numbers, they sense their attack-and-oppose strategy will yield a bountiful harvest in this year's congressional elections.

Obama acknowledged those defeats, even as he expressed an urgent need for the two sides to work together.

"Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved," the president told Congress and millions of Americans. "But I wake up everyday knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year."

Helping those families is the prize Obama and Congress must keep their eyes on. Otherwise, it's just politics as usual, and not what any American should hope for.